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With current eating trends, consuming unhealthy inorganic food, too many calories and eating out, obesity seems to have taken over the globe, also obese people are at greater risk of developing various hazardous health conditions. According to new research, the probability of returning to your standard weight after becoming obese is just 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women over a one year period.

For people who are extremely obese, shedding great amounts of weight in a year is even more improbable, a study of UK health records evaluated.

Researchers share that the latest programs for assisting obese patients are not working.

A group from King’s College London wants to exercise “wider-reaching public health policies” to avert people from becoming obese from the very beginning.

Lead researcher Dr Alison Fildes explained that the major treatment alternatives recommended to obese people in the UK – weight management programmes via their GP – failed for a vast majority.

“Treatment needs to focus on stopping people gaining more weight and maintaining even small levels of weight loss,” she said.

“Current strategies that focus on cutting calories and boosting physical activity aren’t working for most patients to achieve weight loss and maintain that.”

“The greatest opportunity for fighting the obesity epidemic might be in public health policies to prevent it in the first place at a population level.”

Health records

The research basically recorded the weight of 278,982 men and women between years 2004 and 2014 via electronic health records.

People who had undergone weight loss surgery were exempted.

In the course of the study, 1,283 men and 2,245 women returned to their normal body weight.

For obese people having a Body Mass Index of 30 to 35, the chances of trimming down over a year was 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women.

This elevated 1 in 1,290 for men and 1 in 677 for women with morbid obesity (BMI 40 to 45).

Dr Fildes guided, the numbers for losing 5% of body weight were very motivating- about 1 in 12 men and 1 in 10 women managed to do in a year’s time, though most of them had put on weight again within a period of five years.

And more than one third of the men and women who studied experienced episodes of weight loss and weight gain.

Co-researcher Prof Martin Gulliford of King’s College London said latest policies regarding managing obesity were not working to assist a large number of obese patients who she weight.

“The greatest opportunity for stemming the current obesity epidemic is in wider-reaching public health policies to prevent obesity in the population,” he added.